Episode 89: Jill Miller & Robert Faust: The Business of Fitness
When You Are Authentic, Your People Will Find You
About Today’s Guests
Jill Miller is the co-founder of Tune Up Fitness Worldwide and creator of the self-care fitness formats Yoga Tune Up® and The Roll Model® Method. With more than thirty years of study in anatomy and movement, she is a pioneer in forging relevant links between the worlds of fitness, yoga, massage, athletics, and pain management.
She is known as the Teacher’s Teacher and has trained thousands of movement educators, clinicians, and manual therapists to incorporate her paradigm-shifting self-care fitness programming into athletic and medical facility programs internationally. She has crafted original programs for 24 Hour Fitness, Equinox, YogaWorks, and numerous professional sports teams. She and her team of 500-plus teachers empower people to live better in their body with an emphasis on proprioception, mobility, breath mechanics, and recovery.
She has presented case studies at the Fascia Research Congress and International Association of Yoga Therapy conferences and served as the anatomy columnist for Yoga Journal. She has the rare ability to translate complex physiological and biomechanical information into accessible, relevant moves that help her students transform pain, dysfunction, and injury into robust fitness.
Jill and her programs have been featured in Shape, Men’s Journal, Good Housekeeping, Women’s Health, Yoga Journal, Self, and on the Today Show, Good Morning America and on the Oprah Winfrey Network. She is the creator of dozens of DVDs and online video programs, including Treat While You Train with Kelly Starrett, DPT, and is the author of the internationally bestselling book The Roll Model: A Step by Step Guide to Erase Pain, Improve Mobility and Live Better in your Body. Based in Los Angeles, she is a wife and mother of two small children and is currently writing her second book.
Robert Faust is an entrepreneur with a focus on identifying and capitalizing on undeveloped niche market opportunities. Currently, Faust is president and CEO of Tune Up Fitness Worldwide, Inc., a wellness company with a mission of bringing simple self-care healthcare practices into daily living. Through a catalog of professional education programs based on two proprietary fitness formats and a line of self-care fitness products, Tune Up’s breath, movement and mindset pillars empower people to live better in their body. Faust and his wife, Jill Miller, co-founded Tune Up Fitness in 2009.
Prior to Tune Up, Faust founded Arthouse Marketing Group (AMG), a cinema advertising company focused on pre-show advertising in the arthouse sector. AMG built the first national network of arthouse cinemas for the sale of pre-show advertising, driving national campaigns for marketers such as Jaguar, Range Rover, American Express, Rolex, Turner Classic Movies, Fox Searchlight Pictures, HBO, the BBC, Starbucks, and many others. Faust sold AMG in 2008, which still runs today as Spotlight Cinema Networks.
In 2000, Faust co-founded the multi-media Internet company, MediaTrip.com. MediaTrip served as the online marketing arm to Revolution Studios, promoting their initial slate of films including America’s Sweethearts (starring Julia Roberts, Billy Crystal, and John Cusak). As an online entertainment destination, MediaTrip acquired and provided online incubation for content and original programming to sell to traditional distribution channels. As one of the only companies to successfully execute this model, MediaTrip launched the animated series Gary the Rat, featuring the voice of Emmy award-winning actor Kelsey Grammer, which it later sold to Spike TV as a ½ hour series. MediaTrip also developed the animated show Lil’ Pimp, selling it to Revolution Studios who produced it as a full-length feature film. Continuing to blend the online and offline worlds, MediaTrip marketed and distributed the most successful short film compilation DVD to date featuring the highly publicized George Lucas in Love. Selling over 50,000 units, this title became a #1 seller on Amazon for two consecutive days as well as a top ten seller for over three weeks.
Prior to MediaTrip, Faust founded the Los Angeles Film Festival in 1995. During his tenure, the festival included such sponsors as Kodak, Sundance Channel, Entertainment Weekly, Chevrolet, Levis, and many other national brands. Growing the festival over a five-year period and garnering over 25,000 participants annually, Faust licensed the festival to be held internationally in Tokyo and went on to eventually sell the event to Film Independent (home of the Independent Spirit Awards) in order to launch his next project Mediatrip.com.
Faust has been profiled in numerous magazine articles and participated as a featured speaker at festivals and trade events around the country. As a proven marketer, Mr. Faust’s projects and programs have been spotlighted in both business trade and consumer media outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly, Spin Magazine, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, CNN, NPR, Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, The Tonight Show, Siskel and Robert “At the Movies,” and many other outlets locally, nationally and internationally.
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Show Notes
We change this up a bit this week and begin by talking about how Jill Miller met her husband, Robert Faust.
Prior to fitness, Robert’s background was in the entertainment and marketing industry, and so his expertise combined with Jill’s creativity made for the perfect partnership, both in life and business.
We begin by talking about the importance of our intellectual property (IP) and how we can often feel pressured to give our content away for free in exchange for the “opportunity” and “exposure.”
Robert reminds us of the importance of remembering the hard work and hours of research and practice that you put into your programs and products, and that it is always good to get advice when these types of opportunities come your way. Intellectual Property can be broken apart, and so Robert also invites us to look at all aspects of the content we own, to future proof our work and our future career, that we all have worked so hard to create. It is always good to have everything written down, so there is nothing left to chance.
We talk about how we can expand our reach and do great things in the world, doing something for the greater good but not the expense of our own health and happiness. We explore the poverty mindset that often comes with being a creative and the importance of facing our money stories and beliefs around finances and success. We go into how our self-worth will contribute to how we view our worth in the world, and that this is work we all need to do to be able to find the balance between giving to others and taking care of ourselves.
We move to discuss the “free” culture, and how it is essential to look at how you can inspire others and grow your profile without giving “everything” away. I talk about why I do the podcast and how we can all create content that ties back to you, your purpose, and how you want to impact the world for good.
We shift into talking about how Robert and Jill try and balance, work, family, children, and life. I love the honesty of this part of our conversation and how it can be challenging to balance passion, purpose, and self-care. Jill talks about the balance between creativity and productivity and how it can sometimes be hard to find, especially when it comes to motherhood.
Robert talks about the importance of planning. He believes that a lot of people fail to plan out their vision and understand the steps and milestones that it takes to accomplish their goals. He invites us to also look at what it takes to work backward and come up with just a few first steps that will get you closer to that next milestone. When we plan it helps us build both the confidence and competence to reach our dream goals.
Jill reminds us that in addition to being strategic and doing the marketing, we also need to have people around us, who believe in us, and who will give us a chance to put our work out in the world. Our creativity and ideas cannot only happen in our heads, but the place where they will grow into their potential is out in the world as we beta test our materials.
We wrap up the show talking about the importance of being authentic, as this way when you share your unique voice, the right people will find you. Robert also reminds us to credit the people who we have learned from. Once again, it is the ripple effect and allows us all to remember that the world is big enough for us all to succeed.
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